Family Legends:
What They're Worth
This is one of those issues that has been endlessly debated among genealogists on
the usenet newsgroups. Some genealogists place little stock in family legends, and
expect the precision of a laboratory scientist in any conclusions from the data.
Conversely, other genealogists prize even the unproven family stories as clues for
further research and glimpses of their ancestors' personalities and values.
So, why put my opinion here? Hey! It's my Web site! (Smile)
Question
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What are family legends?
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Answer
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Family legends are stories passed down from generation to generation, purporting to
tell family history, but with the family not having proof that the legends are true.
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Question
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What are some examples of family legends?
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Answer
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- "My great-great-great-grandmother was a Native American squaw."
- "My great-great-great-great-grandfather was killed by a bear when he saved his
child by stepping between the child and the bear."
- "My family comes from German royalty."
These stories are legends because they may, or may not, be true.
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Question
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How often are family legends true?
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Answer
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I'm with those genealogists who believe that family legends are often true,
whether that be fully true or partly true.
Looking at the first example, I would guess that except for families that descend
from a blatant liar, most families that have preserved a story of Native American heritage
through the generations probably do have an important Native American connection
in the family history.
For one thing, until recently the social pressure was in the direction of denying
multi-racial roots to avoid social stigma in American culture.
I suspect that families that preserved such a story of bi-racial roots, despite social
pressure to do otherwise, were telling the truth more often than not.
And, if you think about the realities of frontier life in American history, in each
stage of frontier expansion there were a lot more European men than European women in the
earliest years of each frontier settlement. When you ponder that fact, along with how
few people there were in the frontier areas, and how we are therefore related to most
everyone we've ever met, it seems likely
that almost every American whose family has been here for more than a few generations
would be multi-racial.
Put another way, if your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were all in
North America (and remember, you have 128 gr-gr-gr-gr-gr-grandparents), given the
realities of frontier America, you surely have some mixed racial ancestry, whether
that includes European, Native American, African American, or Asian mixes.
It is no accident that America has as one of it's nicknames, "Melting Pot."
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Question
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How do you prove a family legend is true?
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Answer
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Now therein lies the challenge! If a family story remains a legend, it's probably
because it is difficult to prove the story.
To use the example of Native American ancestry again,
most Native American Tribes used oral history instead of written records
until the late 1800's. Unfortunately, that makes the written records more recent than
most of the frontier bi-racial marriages.
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Question
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Does such lack of proof make a family legend worthless?
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Answer
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No. The family legend is still valuable in a couple of important ways.
First, the legend may be true, and it guides you in areas that
need to be researched.
I would document a family legend in the same way that I document any other
piece of genealogy data -- by attaching to it whatever source information I have, so
that the reader of my report can decide for him or her self what they think of the
quality of my source. Obviously, the source will be strong if it's photocopies with
my ancestor's names from the U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs tribal records.
The source will be more
subject to question if it is based on interviews with several relatives several
generations after the fact.
But, it would be equally reckless to either present the story as more proven than it
is, or conversely to suppress the story because of lack of written records.
Present the family legend, with an honest reference to your sources, so that you are
neither exagerating, nor prematurely denying, your family history.
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Question
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You said that Family Legends, even if unproven, are valuable for a couple of
important reasons. What is the other one, besides the fact that they might
be true and give you clues about what to research?
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Answer
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Family legends give one a little taste of the personality of one's ancestors.
For example, even if I am never able to prove our family legend of having ancestors
in the Ute Tribe, I am very proud that my ancestors saw a bi-racial heritage as
a valuable thing during a time when much of society was plagued with racial prejudice.
That is something I can know
about my family from the telling of the legend, whether or not the legend is true.
Family legends, like other stories, add color to the family history. One has to have
hard data (birthdates, birth locations, marriage dates, marriage locations, death dates,
death locations, burial locations, etc.) in any genealogical research project.
But numbers alone can be boring. Including stories, from both the remote family
history and the modern family history, make the report come to life as the reader
is given a glimpse of the personalities and lives of your ancestors.
If you are able to add family photographs and relics to the stories and data, your
genealogy report becomes a fascinating trip into the past.
Again, I am not suggesting that anything be called proven that is not proven.
The honesty comes with clearly identifying the source of every piece of data,
every photograph and every story that you include in your report.
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